Hedva

Before any of my other identities or occupations, and no matter what I said, did, produced, or defined myself as, I saw that I was now defined by society in terms of the care I needed—and that this was true for anyone defined by care, whether they “gave” it or “took” it—and this was a raw fucking deal. By medical doctors baffled by my symptoms and dismissive of their validity; by social workers and bosses and other cogs in the wheels of capitalism who demanded the continuity of my labor while simultaneously denigrating me to the category of worthless because my body disrupted my labor’s continuity; by institutions who swept in to finesse my condition into something that could be rendered into an art-historical and cultural product; by friends, family, lovers, and enemies who didn’t believe it could be as bad as I said it was: I was now seen as malingering, a burden, a drain on resources, possibly faking it, certainly hysterical, a thing resplendent with pathology—simply because I had a body that needed more than it was supposed to need. Who decided this—who exactly was the arbiter of what a body was supposed and not supposed to do, need, and be—decided a status that was not in fact produced by my internal condition. No, this was the accumulation of a thousand tiny and not-so-tiny external events, tones of speaking, methods institutional and otherwise of disregard and dismissal, mechanisms built to dole out pathology to a thing like me. As a sick person, I watched as the perceptions of others amassed and clustered onto me, like a little pile of arrows that got aimed, shot, and stuck. If one arrow was tweaked, they all started to move, and it hurt, the pain went deep. After a while, I couldn’t tell where the pain came from, if it originated from somewhere inside me, or was caused by something outside of me that had gone in too far. I knew that this was how ideologies of oppression work: they seep into you, get into your cells, hunker down and dig in and make a home out of you. I also knew that, no matter where it came from, the hurt was real, it sounded like my own voice, it lived in me now. But it was pain that had very little to do with my actual illness, and what fucked with my head the most was realizing that the internal condition of my illness—which felt vastly multiplicitous in what it made within me, all the worlds of experience it took me to—had been erased in favor of the external value placed upon it, which was carcerally narrow and confined to mean a set of things that I did not particularly agree with, nor consent to being. This erasure did not happen by accident. It was the intended outcome of a larger system of institutions—medical, cultural, capitalist, statist—and the ideologies that feed them—classist, racist, white-supremacist, imperialist, colonial, patriarchal, cis- and heteronormative, sexist, ableist. For the benefit of these systems, I realized that the most common and universalizing condition of life—that our bodies are fragile, get sick, need rest, need support, that they need at all—had been twisted into the measure of one’s own individual failure, something to be ashamed of and sorry for and kept out of sight until the symptoms passed and things could return to “normal.” By design, this is how the world is built—for whom? Why?

Johanna Hedva


I tried to explain to this woman that my rider is a way of taking seriously the fact that, even if we are told we have to, we cannot do this alone. Care is always a deficit, access is always insolvent—and that’s the point. This is because the body, by definition, is a thing that needs support—it needs food, rest, sleep, shelter, care. I like to truncate this definition, to make the body simply a thing that needs, period, because what else would support be—but needed? The body’s dependency is its ontology: it cannot survive alone unto itself, even if it wanted to. Yet we’ve been taught that such dependencies, such needs, are abnormal, disgraceful, an index of one’s inadequacy. Capitalism and its attendant ideologies have used powerful magic to make us believe the opposite of what is true: They have persuaded us that the most important force on earth is one’s individual will and the ability to manifest it, regardless of what that would require in terms of material resources; they have convinced us that any one person’s success is the simple result of a decision they made to thrive, and not because of the support any individual requires to do anything, on any scale, always. They have induced us to think that the failure to lead a life of wealth, ease, comfort, and privilege is because that person just couldn’t get it together, couldn’t pull themselves up by their bootstraps, wasn’t willing to put in the work. This is a mighty myth, one that is vaunted as universal, and it is the vehicle for that most romantic and nonexistent of subjects: the man who makes new worlds simply because he wants to, who shapes his destiny of his own accord. His body cuts through the void without history or politics or needs of any kind, no tether to anyone or anything else. He is not us, because he is impossible—but we all wish he was us, we all throw ourselves at his feet, try to make ourselves in his image. What is required to sustain this myth? Who hoists him up? Who is that behind him, in the background, helping him get there, defining him as what she is not?

Johanna Hedva


My Access Rider is not about sharing the load so that we can suddenly be in the black: it’s about redefining what being in the red means, what being insolvent to each other does, and it’s about acknowledging that we will always be there, covered, totally, in red.

And yet we’ve built our world as if this fact deviates us from where we should be. We’ve framed care within the context of debt—where my “giving” care to you means I’m depleting my own stash, and your “taking” from me means that now you owe me—and although we’ve made debt into an index of our deficiency, we’ve also made it the only possible condition of life under capitalism. To be alive in capitalism is by definition to live in debt, and yet we’ve defined debt not as a kind of radical interdependency, as the ontological mutuality of being alive together on this planet—which it is—but as all that reveals our worst, what happens when we fail, a moral flaw that ought to be temporary and expunged. By doing this, the omnipresence of our need is framed as a kind of weird bankruptcy that happens only to the weak—which is a fucking canard. The logic of capitalism states that the person who needs support from society is a burden on that society, but this logic can only work when the premise holds that our natural state is one of surplus—and it is not. Yes, it might be nice to labor without limits, survive without support, live without loss, decline, and fatigue, but that’s not how it is.

Johanna Hedva

“We are convinced that liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality''.

      Bakunin

 

Jensen

Unless it is stopped, the dominant culture will kill everything on the planet, or at least everything it can.

Each holocaust is unique. The destruction of the European Jewry did not look like the destruction of the American Indians. It could not, because the technologies involved were not the same, the targets were not the same, and the perpetrators were not the same. They shared motivations and certain aspects of their socialization, to be sure, but they were not the same. Similarly, the slaughter of Armenians (and Kurds) by Turks did not (and does not) look like the slaughter of Vietnamese by Americans. And just as similarly, the holocausts of the twenty-first century will not and do not already look like the great holocausts of the twentieth. They cannot, because this society has progressed.

And every holocaust looks different depending on the class to which the observer belongs. The Holocaust looked far different to high ranking Nazi officials and to executives of large corporations—both of whose primary social concerns would have been how to maximize production and control, that is, how to most effectively exploit human and nonhuman resources—than it did to good Germans, whose primary concerns were as varied as the people themselves but probably included doing their own jobs—immoral as those jobs may have been from an outside perspective—as well as possible; may have included feelings of relief that those in power were finally doing something about the “Jewish Problem”; and certainly included doing whatever they could to not notice the greasy smoke from the crematoria (constructed with the best materials and faultless workmanship). The Holocaust then also looked different to good Germans than it did to those who resisted, whose main concerns may have been how to bring down the system. And it looked different to those who resisted than it did to those who were considered untermenschen, whose main concerns may have been staying alive, or failing that, dying with humanity.

Manifest Destiny looked different to Indians than it did to JP Morgan. American slavery looked different to slaves than it did to those whose comforts and elegancies were based on slavery, and than it did to those for whom free black labor drove down their wages.

What will the great holocausts of the twenty-first century will look like? It depends on where you stand. Look around.

If you’re in group one, one of those in power, your post-modern holocausts will be at most barely visible, and at least a price you’re willing to pay, as Madame Albright said about killing Iraqi children. The holocausts will probably share similarities with other holocausts, as you attempt to maximize production—to “grow the economy,” as you might say—and as when necessary you attempt to eradicate dissent. This means the holocaust will look like a booming economy beset by shifting problems that somehow always keep you from ever reaching the Promised Land, whatever that might be. The holocaust will look like numbers on ledgers. It will look like technical problems to be solved, whether those problems are increasing your access to necessary resources, dealing with global warming, calming unrest on the streets, or figuring out what to do about too many unproductive people on land you know you could put to better use. The holocaust will look like houses with gates, limousines with bullet-proof glass, and a military budget that can never stop increasing.

The holocaust will feel like economics. It will feel like progress. It will feel like technological innovation. It will feel like civilization. It will feel like the way things are.

If you’re in the second group, the good Germans, you will continue to be co-opted into supporting the system that does not serve you well. Perhaps the holocaust will look like a new car. Perhaps it will look like lending your talents to a major corporation—or more broadly toward economic production—so you can make a better life for your children. Perhaps it will look like working as an engineer for Shell or on an assembly line for General Motors. Maybe it will look like basing a person’s value on her or his employability or productivity. Perhaps it will look like anger at Mexicans or Pakistanis or Algerians or Hmong who compete with you for jobs. Perhaps it will look like outrage at environmentalists who want to save some damn suckerfish, even (or especially) if it impinges on your property rights, or if it takes water you need to irrigate, to make the desert bloom, to make the desert productive. Maybe it will feel like continuing to do a job that you hate—and that requires so little of your humanity—because no matter how you try, you never can seem to catch up. Maybe it will feel like being tired at the end of the day, and just wanting to sit and watch some television.

Derrick Jensen

Fuchs

"The linkage between body, self, and other also characterizes the phenomenology of moods; it is a common understanding in phenomenology that moods are not inner states, but permeate and tinge the whole field of experience. Thus, moods are atmospheric in nature, radiating through the environment like warmth or cold, and conferring corresponding expressive qualities on the whole situation. It is no coincidence that we often use words taken from weather such as ‘bright’, ‘sunny’, ‘gloomy’, ‘clouded’, or ‘dark’ to denote mood states as well as the atmosphere of situations. On the other hand, moods also include background feelings of the body, such as feelings of lightness and freshness in elation, or of heaviness and weariness in depression. The phenomenology of moods is well expressed in the German notion of Stimmung which implies metaphors of attunement, concordance, and orchestration. Moods may be said to ‘tune’ body, self, and environment to a common chord, similar to a tonality linking a series of notes and chords to the major or minor key. Thus they tend to establish a consonance of bodily feeling, emotion, and environmental atmosphere.3 Moreover, moods link the background feeling of the body to the potentialities of a given life situation. ‘The mood has already disclosed, in every case, Being-in-the-world as a whole, and makes it possible first of all to direct oneself towards something’ (Heidegger, 1962, p. 176). Moods are thus both feelings of the body and ways of finding oneself in the world. They indicate ‘how things stand’ in our life and how we are disposed to react to the present situation. Such feelings do not only include typical moods such as elation, serenity, sadness, or melancholy, but also what Ratcliffe (2008) has termed existential feelings: feelings of wideness or restriction, freedom or imprisonment, vulnerability or protection, familiarity or estrangement, reality or unreality, feeling alive or feeling dead. However, it seems important to note that all these background feelings are not just related to an anonymous world, but to the world that we share with others, or to the interpersonal world. They are existential feelings of being-with. It is primarily in our coexistence with others that we feel close or distant, familiar or alienated, open or restricted, and even real. 224 T. FUCHS [3] Of course it may occur that one’s mood is in contrast to the atmosphere one encounters in the environment, as when a sad person enters a cheerful party, but usually there is at least a tendency of mood and surrounding atmosphere to converge. Thus, interaffectivity is not merely a particular section or application of our emotional endowment. Rather, it is the encompassing sphere in which our emotional life is embedded from birth on. This sphere has its centre in the lived body: through its affectability and resonance it mediates our participation in a shared space of affective attunement. To summarize: in contrast to the common cognitivist picture in which our mental states and emotions are located within our head, phenomenology regards feelings as residing in between individuals. Human beings do not have moods or emotions independent of their embodied relations and interactions with their fellow human beings. Emotions are ways of being in the world, emerging on the basis of a pre-reflective attunement with others, indicating the current state of our relations, interests, and conflicts, and manifesting themselves as attitudes and expressions of the body. This view appears to be quite common among cultural anthropologists as well: numerous ethnographic studies, particularly in the Pacific and Africa, have noted that emotions are a primary idiom for defining and negotiating relations of self-with-others in a moral order (see Lutz and White, 1986, and Lindholm, 2007, for an overview). In these studies, emotions emerge as socially shaped and regulated; they are less construed as inner states, as conceived by western psychology, but result from people’s engagements with others. Similarly, in these cultures, the source of emotional disturbance, imbalance, or illness is assumed to lie primarily in the social world".

Thomas Fuchs

''The depressive patient experiences a local or general oppression, anxiety, and constriction (e.g. a feeling of an armour or tyre around the chest, of a pressure in the head, etc.). The materiality, density, and weight of the body, otherwise suspended and unnoticed in everyday performance, now come to the fore and are felt painfully. In this respect, depression closely resembles somatic illnesses such as infections which affect one’s overall bodily state. Corresponding reports from patients may well be elicited provided that the interviewer takes their bodily experience seriously; they will complain about feelings of fatigue, exhaustion, paralysis, aches, sickness, nausea, numbness, etc. of body and environment is blocked, drive and impulse are exhausted. Sense perception and movement are weakened and finally walled in by the general rigidity which is also visible in the patient’s gaze, face, or gestures. In order to act, the patients have to overcome their psychomotor inhibition and to push themselves to even minor tasks. With growing inhibition, sensorimotor space is restricted to the nearest environment, culminating in depressive stupor. In sum, depression may be described as a reification or corporealization of the lived body (Fuchs, 2005).4 The constriction and encapsulation of the body corresponds to the psychosocial experiences that typically lead to depression. These are experiences of a disruption of relations and bonds, including the loss of relevant others or of important social roles, furthermore situations of a backlog in one’s duties, falling short of one’s aspirations, or social defeat (Tellenbach, 1980; Bjorkqvist, 2001). In terms of temporality, one may speak of a social desynchronization (Fuchs, 2001): the movement of life is blocked and the person is unable to keep pace with others. These situations of social separation or defeat are perceived as particularly threatening since the patients feel they do not have the necessary resources for coping (‘learned helplessness’, Seligman, 1975). Depression is the consequent psychophysiological reaction: at the biological level, it involves a pattern of neurobiological, metabolic, immunological, biorhythmic, and other organismic dysfunctions which are equivalent to a partial decoupling or separation between organism and environment.5 These dysfunctions are experienced as a loss of drive and interest (anhedonia), psychomotor inhibition, bodily constriction, and depressive mood''.

Thomas Fuchs

"Since the affective contact to the environment is also essential for our basic sense of reality and belonging to the world, a loss of body resonance always results in a certain degree of derealization and depersonalization. Therefore affective depersonalization is a core feature of severe depressive episodes (Kraus, 2002; Stanghellini, 2004). However, there is a special kind of melancholic depression in which depersonalization is the prominent symptom; in German psychopathology it is called ‘Entfremdungsdepression’ (depersonalized depression; Petrilowitsch, 1956). Here the emotional quality of perception is lost completely, objects look blunt or dead, and space seems hollowed out, as it were''.

Thomas Fuchs

Simon Susen (On Habermas)

Simon Susen’s Critical Notes on Habermas’s Theory of Public Sphere

In his book the Social Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas does a socio-historical analysis of how the public sphere changed from the 18th century and beyond. Put into the perspective of Habermas’ life work, he is intrigued by this change because he sees great potential in the public sphere, particularly for the sake of deliberative process in a democracy. Though it should be noted, he wasn’t quite at this point yet in his thought. This work is significant not so much for the accuracy of its historical analysis, but for the tools Habermas uses, his overall approach to understanding the public sphere and why it should demand our attention. Both Habermas and Susen are greatly concerned with the normative function of the private and public distinction.

As is often the starting point with the public/private dichotomy, we are meant to go back to the two spheres of society in ancient Greece; the polis and oikos. Polis referred to the public sphere, a space where free citizens engaged in open interactions. Oikos, in contrast, meant the private sphere, which was a hidden sphere of interactions in the domestic realm (p. 38/39). Key to understanding the distinction between the two is not to understand their relationship as a polarity, but as a reciprocity. These two realms were mutually dependent on one another, particularly the power structures of both. Why we might bother looking at this dichotomy at all is that, for the sake of socio-historical analysis, it allows us to explore the unique ideological and material contingencies that arise given the reciprocity between the two in any given society at any particular time.

In his text, Habermas is interested in the factors that led to the transformation of the relations between the public and private in the modern era. His answer, which we will not focus on, was that given the rise of mercantile capitalism in the 16th century along with evident changes in institutional forms of political power within and between European countries at the time, a whole new form of public sphere emerged in early modern Europe (p.40).

Susen wanting to look at Habermas’ theory critically asks what does the conceptual separation between the two spheres actually represent? For this he denotes three different meanings often attached to the concept: society versus individual, visibility versus concealment and openness versus closure. The first of these is a central concept to sociological thought. The social sciences of course emphasize, “the society” and tend to study the individual in terms of the social and not the reverse (p.41). The second of the three, visibility and concealment asks what parts of social life are visible and which parts are hidden. The more intriguing political question asks, which parts of society ought to be visible and which parts ought to be concealed. Here numerous ideological institutional frameworks come forth. Susen uses the example of liberalism, which has maintained a deep suspicion toward an interventionist state and is critical of any form of authoritarian attempt to control people’s lives, a topic which we have discussed a great deal about in previous meetings. The third meaning, which often accompanies the private/public dichotomy, is that of openness and closure. Questions we might ask are: is the state simply a part of the public sphere and thus open and accessible; is the family an integral part of the private sphere and therefore closed and sealed to the public? Undoubtedly all possibilities are needed as the state requires some closure and the household, openness. All of this said, Susen concludes that the public/private distinction is a useful one, but a rather controversial one particularly for social and political analysis.

Habermas is interested in the public sphere in this dichotomy. His public sphere is a specific kind, he writes, “[t]he bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as a sphere of private people who come together as a public” (p.43). Such a definition implies an immediate connection, for Habermas, between the two parts of the dichotomy we have described above. Individuals are autonomous with one another, not in isolation, but in relation with one another. Susen calls this the “socialized expression of individuals” (ibid). Sociologically, the interest in the public sphere is how it works as mode of societal integration. Habermas takes this a step further and tries to capture how these modes, themselves, might change. Lost in the English translation of the title, Habermas’ is not invested in the structural transformation of the public sphere, but in the transformation of structures in the public spheres and how this happens. Here Susen clarifies Habermas normative sensitivities—within the (bourgeois) public sphere there is emancipatory potential. The existence of the public sphere depends on the promotion for civic engagement and communicative processes (p.45). If subjects are capable of speech and action, they too can reflect and criticize. Habermas here denotes three specific forms of critique that appear in a bourgeois public sphere: a critique of the absolutist state, a critique of democratic states and a self-reflective critique of the public sphere itself. It is this capacity for critique, which we will discuss again shortly, that Habermas finds most attractive about the public sphere. The public sphere, in short, is a collective realm where individuals, through their cognitive capacities and abilities, take on the role of critical and responsible actors; this is indicative of society’s coordinative capacity to transform itself into an emancipatory project shaped by the normative force of communicative rationality (p.47). One wonders if Habermas can conceive of any other form of liberation, be that it may, individual or one which works differently from the version of the public sphere he envisions.

The current structural transformation of the public sphere is tainted with an element of social disintegration. Four reasons are given to why Habermas see it as such, though his final point about the development of the culture industry and the tendency toward constant commodification is arguably the most significant. Here he sees that the potential for the communicative element that arises from the public sphere is being colonized by the functionalist rationality of the state and the economy (p.51).

Susen points to a number of issues in Habermas’ work. First of all, Habermas completely relies on a notion of the “bourgeois” public sphere, entirely ignoring any other forms of public sphere that could contribute to the critical engagement with the world he so demands. Secondly, by focusing on both these bourgeois and critical elements, Habermas is clearly overestimating the potential for the emancipatory in public life and therefore he underestimates the influences of its repressive elements. The third, more recent critique of Habermas’ theory is that it is gender blind, but in so being gender blind, inevitably gives into the dominant patriarchal view of society (p.53). This introduces a broader series of attacks from all marginalized groups. Fourthly it is entirely stuck in the western philosophical tradition, which conceives of a rationalistic conception of the public. This privileges rational approaches to non-rational forms of engagement with the world (p.54). Fifthly, Habermas promotes a universalistic conception of public interest, though he obviously focuses on the bourgeois public sphere. We might ask, what might other public spheres look like? Counterpublics?

Habermas’ analysis, more that the fruits of this analysis, are worthy of our attention. More for the trajectory of his own work, the concept of the public sphere is useful as it provides a forum for deliberative processes aimed at the democratic construction of society (p. 56). As Susen notes, without a doubt, “the development of social life in the modern era is shaped by both the normative opportunities and the normative limitations of public discourses” (ibid). Understanding the dichotomy and reciprocity between the public and private spheres is fundamental for understanding the construction of modern liberal societies and the construction of new societies.

Habermas’ Knowledge and Human Interests

To a great extent this text of Habermas’ is firmly seated in the tradition of the Frankfurt school, a tradition which, as we have most recently seen with Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man, circulates around the question of criticality. The particular direction of this critical level of reflection in this text is made clear in his preface:

“I am undertaking a historically oriented attempt to reconstruct the prehistory of modern positivism with the systematic intention of analyzing the connections between knowledge and human interests. In following the process of the dissolution of epistemology, which has left the philosophy of science in its place, one makes one’s way over abandoned stages of reflection. Retreading this path from a perspective that looks back toward the point of departure may help to recover the forgotten experience of reflection. That we disavow reflection is positivism” (vii, emphasis added).

Though we will not discuss his socio-historical analysis of this positivism he speaks of, as is the case with Habermas, what he offers in this analysis is a powerful means of thinking about the relationship between knowledge and the human condition. In this text, Habermas is convinced that we are becoming increasingly reliant on the importance of the natural and behavioral sciences (and their means to knowledge i.e. positivism). Before we continue further, we must come to an understanding of the meanings and justifications of these sciences. We must come to know how they generate knowledge. How, in fact, does human interest generate knowledge? Habermas denotes 3 schemes or domains of knowledge and their corresponding human interests. Briefly the forms of knowledge are: instrumental/analytical, practical/hermeneutical and critical/emancipatory. Instrumental knowledge comes from technical interests of people and its correlating methods are positivistic. Its equivalent epistemological direction would be, “Knowing that”. This form of knowledge refers to the way individuals control and manipulate their environment. Practical knowledge comes from practical human interests, and attempt to “Know how”. The methods are hermeneutic and interpretive. Here it identifies human social interaction and the notion of communicative action (which we will look at next week). Critical knowledge leads to emancipatory interests. The direction of emancipatory interests are “knowing why”. The method of this last form of knowledge is where Habermas often seats himself, that is, the critical social sciences and critical theory in particular. This domain identifies self-knowledge and/or self-reflection. Here the point is to gain knowledge through reflection which in turn leads to a transformation of consciousness. Feminist theory, critiques of ideology and psychoanalysis are examples of this, as is Habermas’ own work.

In the final chapter of his text, Habermas is interested in seeing how some of these critical theories hold out. Here he is particularly interested in Freud’s psychoanalysis and Freud’s own adaptation of psychoanalysis as applied to the broader society, or “civilization” in Freud’s words.

We return again then to the tension between the state and the individual, that is, to a society and the individuals who comprise it. Why is there society, or “civilization” and why is it necessary? What would a psychoanalytic theory of society look like? The history of civilization, for Freud, is a history that shows the various paths people have chosen to “bind their unsatisfied wishes under the varying conditions of fulfillment and denial by reality” (p.276). Like Marx, Freud contends that “civilization” is the means in which human beings elevate themselves above the conditions of an animal existence and it serves two primary purposes. First, it serves as a retainer for all the knowledge and capacities of people in their self-assertion and control of nature. Secondly, it serves as a way to regulate and adjust the relations of people to one another and distribute wealth (p.277). The institutional framework that derives from the creation of civilization/society is conceived very differently in Marx and Freud however. For Marx institutions derive their force by creating a system of rewards and obligations which, rooted in force, is distorted according to the given class structure. Freud’s conception of the institutional framework however is in connection with the repression of instinctual impulses. For Freud, every individual is therefore essentially an enemy of civilization (ibid). If civilization rests on the compulsion to work, yet individuals who participate in it necessarily renounce or are coaxed to renounce their instinctual impulses, what binds individuals together in a civilization? How does it work? It does so through compulsory norms, which redirects, transforms and suppresses linguistically interpreted needs (p.279). As Habermas writes, collective fantasies are what compensate for the renunciations that have been imposed upon individual by civilization. All of these fantasies are in the public sphere at the level of communication itself. Freud sees all religious views and traditions, all ideals and political systems, all styles and art forms as examples of the “mental assets of civilization”, our “illusions” (Ibid). These illusions change through technical progress.

Is society, then...a pathological phenomenon? It would seem not necessarily so. An illusion is not a delusion. In fact they represent human wishes and are therefore not necessarily unrealizable or in contradiction to reality (p.280). Here Freud makes another sharp distinction between society and the individual offering a space for a kind of emancipation. If we recall that such illusions can change with the development of technology, the individual sees the institutional framework of his or her society as an immovable reality (p.280). But for humans as a whole, the boundaries of reality are in fact movable. There is then a direct correlation between the level of socially necessary repression and the extent of the power of technical control over nature. It would appear then, that technology is the means for which the power structure, which maintains repression, can be loosened. In Habermas’ words then, the illusions of society harbor a utopia. It’s there within reach. In this conception of society, “technical progress opens up the objective possibility of reducing socially necessary repression below the level of institutionally demanded repression” (p.280). At this point the utopian content is freed from the illusions, the ideological components of culture that repress us and legitimize the authority of a given institutional framework. Freed, they can be converted into distinct critiques of the power structures, which have now through technical progress, become historically obsolete. What we have here is a space and a place for class struggle, but one that is only feasible at a particular junction of time. Notably, this juncture is crucially linked to technical development.

Obvious similarities can be seen between this conception of society and Marxs’.

Marx implied in his work that the human species could constitute itself through a process of productive activity and the performance of social labor. Critically he wrote of another process, a self-formative one, which was pushed forward by a critical-revolutionary activity by the classes. This latter process started from a reflection of one’s experiences. But, Marx did not provide an account of the status of science. As he remained lodged into a materialist concept of man with nature he was restricted to the domain of the instrumental described above. In short this instrumental knowledge, knowledge at the level of the productive was not suited for any reconstruction of power or, for Marx, ideology. Key to this would be critical knowledge. For Habermas, Freud’s metapsychology allowed for the conceptualization of how institutional frameworks work and the functioning of illusions to a degree, which Marx could not have reached. For Marx humans raised themselves above animal intelligence when they transformed their behaviors into instrumental action, so his focus is a system of social labor. Instrumental action is purely goal-oriented behavior. Freud on the other hand saw that humans elevated themselves beyond animal existence when they transcended animal society and transformed their instinct-governed behaviors into communicative action, a topic which we will continue with in our next meeting. Of course for Freud his focal point was not social labor, but the family. Habermas’ attraction to Freud, though in may not have been explicit in his work, is his sensitivity to dialogue. For Freud, pathologies of individual consciousness or social institutions resided in the medium of human language and the capacity for communicative action, the ability to mutually deliberate and argue. The interest of this form of reason, this form of action and its epistemological framework is inclined “toward a progressive, critical-revolutionary, but tentative realization of the major illusions of humanity, in which repressed motives, have been elaborated into fantasies of hope” (p.288).

Habermas (excerpt)

The concept of knowledge-constitutive human interests already conjoins the two elements whose relation still has to be explained: knowledge and interest. From everyday experience we know that ideas serve often enough to furnish our actions with justifying motives in place of the real ones. What is called rationalization at this level is called ideology at the level of collective action. In both cases the manifest content of statements is falsified by consciousness’ unreflected tie to interests, despite its illusion of autonomy. The discipline of trained thought thus correctly aims at excluding such interests. In all the sciences routines have been developed that guard against the subjectivity of opinion, and a new discipline, the sociology of knowledge, has emerged to counter the uncontrolled influence of interests on a deeper level, which derive less from the individual than from the objective situation of social groups. But this accounts for only one side of the problem. Because science must secure the objectivity of its statements against the pressure and seduction of particular interests, it deludes itself about the fundamental interests to which it owes not only its impetus but the conditions of possible objectivity themselves. Orientation toward technical control, toward mutual understanding in the conduct of life, and toward emancipation from seemingly ‘‘natural’’ constraint establish the specific viewpoints from which we can apprehend reality as such in any way whatsoever. By becoming aware of the impossibility of getting beyond these transcendental limits, a part of nature acquires, through us, autonomy in nature. If knowledge could ever outwit its innate human interest, it would be by comprehending that the mediation of subject and object that philosophical consciousness attributes exclusively to its own synthesis is produced originally by interests. The mind can become aware of this natural basis reflexively. Nevertheless, its power extends into the very logic of inquiry. Representations and descriptions are never independent of standards. And the choice of these standards is based on attitudes that require critical consideration by means of arguments, because they cannot be either logically deduced or empirically demonstrated. Fundamental methodological decisions, for example such basic distinctions as those between categorial and non categorial being, between analytic and synthetic statements, or between descriptive and emotive meaning, have the singular character of being neither arbitrary nor compelling.12 They prove appropriate or inappropriate. For their criterion is the metalogical necessity of interests that we can neither prescribe nor represent, but with which we must instead come to terms. Therefore my first thesis is this: The achievements of the transcendental subject have their basis in the natural history of the human species. Taken by itself this thesis could lead to the misunderstanding that reason is an organ of adaptation for men just as claws and teeth are for animals. True, it does serve this function. But the human interests that have emerged in man’s natural history, to which we have traced back the three knowledge-constitutive interests, derive both from nature and from the cultural break with nature. Along with the tendency to realize natural drives they have incorporated the tendency toward release from the constraint of nature. Even the interest in self-preservation, natural as it seems, is represented by a social system that compensates for the lacks in man’s organic equipment and secures his historical existence against the force of nature threatening from without. But society is not only a system of self-preservation. An enticing natural force, present in the individual as libido, has detached itself from the behavioral system of self-preservation and urges toward utopian fulfillment. These individual demands, which do not initially accord with the requirement of collective self-preservation, are also absorbed by the social system. That is why the cognitive processes to which social life is indissolubly linked function not only as means to the reproduction of life; for in equal measure they themselves determine the definitions of this life. What may appear as naked survival is always in its roots a historical phenomenon. For it is subject to the criterion of what a society intends for itself as the good life. My second thesis is thus that knowledge equally serves as an instrument and transcends mere self-preservation. The specific viewpoints from which, with transcendental necessity, we apprehend reality ground three categories of possible knowledge: information that expands our power of technical control; interpretations that make possible the orientation of action within common traditions; and analyses that free consciousness from its dependence on hypostatized powers. These viewpoints originate in the interest structure of a species that is linked in its roots to definite means of social organization: work, language, and power. The human species secures its existence in systems of social labor and self assertion through violence, through tradition-bound social life in ordinary-language communication, and with the aid of ego identities that at every level of individuation reconsolidate the consciousness of the individual in relation to the norms of the group. Accordingly the interests constitutive of knowledge are linked to the functions of an ego that adapts itself to its external conditions through learning processes, is initiated into the communication system of a social life-world by means of self-formative processes, and constructs an identity in the conflict between instinctual aims and social constraints. In turn these achievements become part of the productive forces accumulated by a society, the cultural tradition through which a society interprets itself, and the legitimations that a society accepts or criticizes. My third thesis is thus that knowledge constitutive interests take form in the medium of work, language, and power. However, the configuration of knowledge and interest is not the same in all categories. It is true that at this level it is always illusory to suppose an autonomy, free of presuppositions, in which knowing first grasps reality theoretically, only to be taken subsequently into the service of interests alien to it. But the mind can always reflect back upon the interest structure that joins subject and object a priori: this is reserved to self-reflection. If the latter cannot cancel out interest, it can to a certain extent make up for it. It is no accident that the standards of self-reflection are exempted from the singular state of suspension in which those of all other cognitive processes require critical evaluation. They possess theoretical certainty. The human interest in autonomy and responsibility is not mere fancy, for it can be apprehended a priori. What raises us out of nature is the only thing whose nature we can know: language. Through its structure, autonomy and responsibility are posited for us. Our first sentence expresses unequivocally the intention of universal and unconstrained consensus. Taken together, autonomy and responsibility constitute the only Idea the we possess a priori in the sense of the philosophical tradition. Perhaps that is why the language of German Idealism, according to which ‘‘reason’’ contains both will and consciousness as its elements, is not quite obsolete. Reason also means the will to reason. In self-reflection knowledge for the sake of knowledge attains congruence with the interest in autonomy and responsibility. The emancipatory cognitive interest aims at the pursuit of reflection as such. My fourth thesis is thus that in the power of self-reflection, knowledge and interest are one. However, only in an emancipated society, whose members’ autonomy and responsibility had been realized, would communication have developed into the nonauthoritarian and universally practiced dialogue from which both our model of reciprocally constituted ego identity and our idea of true consensus are always implicitly derived. To this extent the truth of statements is based on anticipating the realization of the good life. The ontological illusion of pure theory behind which knowledge-constitutive interests become invisible promotes the fiction that Socratic dialogue is possible everywhere and at any time. From the beginning philosophy has presumed that the autonomy and responsibility posited with the structure of language are not only anticipated but real. It is pure theory, wanting to derive everything from itself, that succumbs to unacknowledged external conditions and becomes ideological. Only when philosophy discovers in the dialectical course of history the traces of violence that deform repeated attempts at dialogue and recurrently close off the path to unconstrained communication does it further the process whose suspension it otherwise legitimates: mankind’s evolution toward autonomy and responsibility. My fifth thesis is thus that the unity of knowledge and interest proves itself in a dialectic that takes the historical traces of suppressed dialogue and reconstructs what has been suppressed.

    KNOWLEDGE AND HUMAN INTERESTS: A GENERAL PERSPECTIVE

“The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.”

He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.”

“I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.”

In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.

“You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug.

From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door.

“I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out.

Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”

Philip K. Dick

 "I don't know you personally, but I know you historically."

James Baldwin